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Most of us feel a twinge of guilt when we gossip about our co-workers. But a paper by two professors at the University of Amsterdam has found that gossip helps identify employees who are shirking their responsibility, making the office a more efficient place.

The paper was published in April in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and written about recently in a British newspaper, the Mail Online.

The researchers asked 221 students to describe the last time they talked about someone behind their backs. Then they filled out a questionnaire about why they had done so. The study found that gathering or checking information was the most important reason.

In a second study, researchers asked the same group of students whether they would gossip about someone who wasn’t doing their share of work. They also asked if the respondents would gossip about the colleague to another co-worker or to a friend they happened to encounter. The respondents said they were more likely to gossip about the shirker to colleagues than to friends. They also said that the main motive for gossiping was to protect their group.

In a third study, the researchers asked 123 students to imagine either a fellow student or an old friend gossiping about them with someone else. When respondents thought someone was gossiping about a lazy person in order to protect the group, the respondents considered the gossip to be “more social and less amoral” than in other situations.

The theory behind productive gossip is that evolution caused gossip to play an important role in society over thousands of years. Getting along as a group made people safer and offered opportunities to share resources, including food. But some group members inevitably didn’t pull their weight. Gossip evolved as a way to tell others in a group about the shirkers.

“The results of our studies show that gossip may not always be as negative as one might believe at first,” Bianca Beersma, the study’s co-author, told the Mail Online. “Gossip allows people to gather and validate information, to enjoy themselves with others, and to protect their group.”